Tender Loving Care

Team Blue,

In 2019, or thereabouts, we had an incredibly harsh winter. I didn't yet have the weather station on the farm, so I don’t know quite how cold it got - and this is the Coldest Spot Around, don’t forget. Across the river in Spring Green it got down to -26°, and the wind was scaldingly cold.

I had just planted the second half of the blueberries the prior summer, and planted the first half the year before. These were young plants, clones created from cuttings or tissue culture and raised in a nursery up in Tomah. They were in full leaf when I planted them - some precocious few even had blueberries. These plants grew and greatened themselves through the summer, and in fall, as is the custom among plants, they put down roots in the surrounding soil. 

They had dealt with all sorts of shocks, unexpected for an immobile plant - a change in latitude, a change in orientation towards the sun, a change in the air, a change in the water, a change in the overall and entire context - but they sorted themselves out all right, and went about diligently preparing themselves for winter. 

In the cold, cold depths of that winter (perhaps the first or second time I’d heard the term “polar vortex”) the tissues in their buds’ water, saturated with sugars and other antifreeze-like compounds, chilled and chilled far below freezing, exposed as they were to the frigid air for days on end. Temperatures did not rise above -10 for a whole night and day and night, did not rise above zero for more than three days. The trembling blueberries in the wind-whipped field had no inner source of heat. They were the temperature of outside.

So cold was the cold that the antifreeze froze.

Water, as we know, expands when it freezes - ice floats and all that. The plant cell’s hard case, filled with liquid, tried to expand - and burst in so doing.

We were freezing our buns off, and they were freezing their buds off. Every plant in the patch, “top-killed”. That's when the top gets killed, but not the bottom, when the exposed tissues above the surface burst, but the tissues of the roots, insulated by soil and snow, do not, for they have not gotten so cold.

I, being a novice blueberry farmer at the time, did not know this. The skin and bark did not look so unusual to my untrained eye, and pruning cuts showed green tissue. I pruned the patch and set about imagining the bounty of summer.

As a member of Team Blue, you may be making such imaginings yourself right now - ah, the blueberries I will pick this summer! And so, imagine my shock, my bona fide shock, when not a single plant leafed out. Yes, the lowest tissue of the stalks had been green, but the far more complicated and delicate machinery of the bud could not tolerate the cold. 

All that growth, gone to waste. All my pruning, mocked. All my optimism, jeopardized. I cut the plants to the ground and hoped for the best.

Imagine my relief, then, to see enthusiastic shoots emerge from the roots and crown, when latent buds sensed that their hour was at hand and leapt into unexpected action. First one plant, then another; every plant had survived.

No, there was no fruit that year, of course - blueberries do not fruit on first year wood - but they leafed out with what reserves they could muster from their roots. Aided by human efforts, including a generous helping of mulch to preserve moisture and keep competition at bay, the plants grew all summer. The second planting, of course, did not have so much root to draw from. The first planting, one year older and considerably more established, came back far more vigorously. Though the plants are reaching adolescence now, the difference between the plantings is still noticeable. Let me know your guess as to which rows were planted first.

I should note that one variety, Northland, a hybrid of these highbush, blueberries and the native lowbush blueberry of even-farther-north Wisconsin, is considerably more cold hardy. Row Seven emerged comparatively unscathed. It leafed out thoroughly, and even preserved its lowest snow-covered flower buds. The native blueberry’s growth habit suggests that it is aware of the risk of extreme cold. Perhaps it was that year that the distinctively flavored Northland blueberry established itself as my personal “Best Tasting Blueberry”.

But why am I waxing on about a winter long passed, you rightly ask.

Well, this winter was rather cold too, you see. It reached -29° here at the Twin Crix weather station on a cold, cold February 18th - only -12° across the river in Spring Green. There was, for much of the winter, little to no snow cover. Had the buds made it through the winter? Had the roots? I did not know. In fact, I could only know in time. I have expressed my worry in conversation with many of you in recent months.

As the weeks went on I observed. The tissues did not seem obviously damaged. I scratched through the bark to expose the cambium layer - green, as hoped. I carefully sliced in half several flower buds to see if the structure betrayed any evidence of smearing burstfulness, and there was none. More skilled in the examination of blueberries than I had been in years past, they did not seem other than healthy. But as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the bud is in the bursting.

And burst they have!

It's barely perceptible now - the protective scales of the buds opening like clockwork, revealing the white tissues inside. Each moment is a single frame of a slow-mo video of a popcorn kernel popping - so slow is the mo that it takes weeks to complete, an almost impossible level of temporal detail. One microsecond spread evenly across a megasecond. Does there in fact exist such density of time, mathematically continuous, that the popping of a single corn can equate with the bursting of a single bud?

Anyway, we've got blueberries coming this summer. Or blooms, at least! Let’s not count our blueberries before they're pollinated. Cold still lurks as a danger - last frosts are agonizingly late here in the Coldest Spot Around. But that is a story for another time.

The blueberries are, in my opinion, in the best shape they've ever been. They’ve put on growth in root and in shoot. They put out a record-breaking crop last year - though one that I’m told by University Extension is a third or less of what we can expect when they reach maturity. They received abundant water after years of drought, from rains and from diligent irrigation. They were pruned regularly for disease, fertilized with ground-up rocks from parts unknown and with chicken shit from down the road. For the first time in years, they even have a fresh coat of mulch, elegantly defining the rows, giving the roots the run of the place.

All they need now is a little TLC.

The mulch could be straightened out, pulled back from the crowns of the plants. The errant bits of prunings - potential harbors of disease - could be removed. The irrigation lines could be laid in place, the final pruning touches made. Most importantly, they could be observed, acknowledged, and remembered. Shouldn’t take long at all.

I'll be doing that this Easter Sunday, in the afternoon, around 2 o'clock. I'd love it if you joined me. 

Greet the blueberries, witness the miracle of life, and give a little tender love and care to your best buds.

Increasingly Warmly,

Twin Crix

4/16/25